At Southampton they occur 150 feet above the river Itchen and the sea and considerably inland, at Bournemouth on a sea-cliff 120 feet in height, and at the Foreland (at the eastern extremity of the Isle of Wight) on a cliff 82 feet above the sea and far remote from any river. If, therefore, these deposits were effected by fluviatile agency, it was evident that all traces of the rivers were afterwards effaced by some great geological changes; or, in the alternative, some great geological change, not fluviatile, must have caused the deposit. Upon the whole, he was disposed to conclude, with the French geologists as well as with many eminent Engish authors, that the accumulation of all these superficial drifts was, as the late Sir Roderick Murchison had said, sudden and tumultuous, not of long continuance; and thus it was such as would result from some kind of diluvial action, rather than from the ordinary long-continued action of water.
Mr. Judd pointed out, in contravention of Mr. Jeffreys's views, that in the Fen-district, over large tracts of gravel of undoubtedly marine origin, there are many pits without a trace of marine shells.
Mr. Prestwich, while willing to concede that the implement-bearing gravel beds had been deposited under more tumultuous action than that due to rivers of the present day, was still forced to attribute the excavation of the existing valleys and the formation of terraces along their slopes to river-action. He showed that Mr. Flower's argument as to the present level of the source of the river was of no weight, as the country in which it had its source was formerly, as now, at a much higher level than the gravel at Downton. As to the absence of marine shells at Cams Wood, he cited a raised beach in Cornwall which, in company with Mr. Jeffreys, he had examined for a mile without finding a trace of a shell, though for the next half mile they abounded. There was the same difference between the raised beaches at Brighton and at Chichester. He was obliged to Mr. Codrington for his correction as to the level at Cams Wood, though the pit was at a higher elevation than the one to which Mr. Codrington had alluded.
2. On some undescribed Fossils from the Menevian Group of Wales.
By Henry Hicks, Esq., F.G.S.
[Abstract[1].]
In this communication the author gave descriptions of all the fossils hitherto undescribed from the Menevian rocks of Wales. The additions made to the fauna of the Lower Cambrian rocks (Longmynd and Menevian groups) by the author's researches in Wales during the last few years now number about fifty species, belonging to twenty-two genera, as follows:——
- ↑ The publication of this paper is deferred.
